My girls and I saw Frida Kahlo’s exhibit this summer, on her birthday coincidentally. Naturally, it had me thinking about the power and complexity of a woman and its connection to why I speak so loudly about generational trauma.
It led me into reflection of a mother’s desperate desire to teach her child every big and little thing she possibly can while erasing parts of history where monsters stir, even before it happens to them. Yet trauma, it’s carried like a crest through the generations. It’s silent in its movement, terrifying in how it screams in our bodies.
We often can’t know why until we finally do. Some parts of my reflection I could put down in words on motherhood as our relationship shifts and transforms together like a body of water:
What grand and disarming things they’ve taught me about this world and myself in my attempts to fiercely protect them. All the rights l’ve tried to instill, the wrongs l’ve tried to make right. Our love is rambunctious as it is quiet. I have so much more to teach them all while I continue to unlock a thousand hidden caverns of the meaning of life, humanity and silent broken places. How arrogant was l as I tried to guide them on all the phenomena that I now find may never reveal itself. I suppose this is motherhood. To own my calling as a guide whose compass needs a hard shake sometimes when I realize it is stuck yet once again. And they follow anyhow knowing we’re all lost together, but for God’s grace that comes in moments such as these, when their lives are now theirs, the compass their own, while mine quietly calibrates for them, just in case. It’s in the moments when we split up in the halls of a museum to find beauty in the art of life and find each other again every time, running to each other in giggles and wonder. We continue to play, run, dance and search each other’s eyes for the children we were, as I was nearly a child when I became a mother and as they too are now adults, and we return again and again to the sandbox in which our toes touched with delight.